


Road Diary

by Barkour



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Gen, Season/Series 01, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-09
Packaged: 2017-12-08 00:33:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/754890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully and Mulder work at figuring out their new partnership on the road.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Flight 340.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote these two short stories back in May of 2012, as part of a larger project that fell through when another, more pressing commitment (nannying) took precedence. Well, here they are together, anyway.

Mulder snuck sunflower seeds onto the plane in the inside pocket of his sports coat. The hem of the right sleeve had a loose string, there, curling along the knobby side of his wrist. His hand stuck out maybe two, three millimeters; he hadn't bothered to have it fitted. He eased the bag open, no _pop!_ to make Scully roll her eyes.

"Want some?" He tipped the bag towards her. Mulder was squinting through the window, through the clouds, at the ground so far below and so shrouded as to be invisible.

"Plausible deniability?" Scully deduced. She stuffed her carry-on back under the seat in front of her. "You know they don't care what you bring on the plane. Within reason."

He shrugged. "What're you reading?"

"A book," said Scully. 

She smoothed the pages with her thumbs and made a show of being immediately absorbed by it. Any human being with reasonable interpersonal skills would have interpreted this to be the particular social cue it was intended to be. Years of moldering in the basement surrounded by decades old files and quite possibly some lingering asbestos insulation in the duct work had structurally weakened the portions of Mulder's purportedly brilliant brain that enabled him to recognize and respond appropriately to such cues. 

He stuck his arm on the armrest; her arm was already there. His elbow jabbed into hers. His hand hung off the end of the rest. Mulder shifted. Scully unfolded her legs then crossed them again so her knees faced away from him. She did not look up from her book.

"'A Taste of Temptation,'" quoted Mulder. He'd bent over to look at the cover. Now, still bent so his overly long and unshaped bangs drooped over his brows, he looked sidelong up at her and grinned. "Agent Scully, are you reading a bodice ripper?"

"I'm reading a romance, yes," she said. She stared fixedly at the page.

He sat up again, but he left his arm where it was nestled along hers. It seemed very comfortable there. Scully felt like her skin ran over with teeny, prickling bugs. She refused to move her arm. If Mulder was uncomfortable with how little space the armrest offered them, he could use the other armrest available to him. He'd got the window seat, so she got the armrests.

He shifted again, moving to stretch his legs then aborting. His shoulder rubbed the air beside her shoulder. The lean line of his shadow fell across her.

"Can I read the back?"

"No," said Scully. 

"I'll let you read the back of the book I brought," said Mulder.

Scully turned the page and said, "You didn't bring a book."

"Oh, ye of little faith," said Mulder. "As a matter of fact, I brought three. They just all happen to be in my checked baggage." He flapped his hanging hand magnanimously, but not, she noted, magnanimously enough to remove his arm from the rest. "I'd be more than happy to lend you one when we get to the hotel. Seeing as you're such the voracious reader. You'd probably enjoy it."

"Ah, yes," said Scully, smiling, "the hard-hitting realism of _The Amityville Horror_."

Mulder leaned close. The faint and faintly cloying sting of his aftershave was strongest at the suggestion of his throat just beneath his jawline. 

"I was thinking more along the lines of _The Oil Baron's Seduction of the Virgin Queen_."

She turned on him then, her eyebrow crooked, that damn smile still on her face. The corners of his mouth were soft, ready to crook up in that lazy way they did. That softness did it. He annoyed her, and she responded to it when she meant to simply ignore him.

"If I let you read the back of it, will you let me read?"

"I can't put my seat back," he said apologetically.

Scully considered him. "Do you always fuss this much when you don't get a nap?"

"I'm not fussing," said Mulder. "I'm instigating an interpersonal communication centered on a mutual surrender of information, to encourage intimacy within the partnership."

"I'm not going out with you," said Scully, amused.

"Well, I don't want you to go out with me," said Mulder.

"Here," said Scully. She shoved the book at him. "Read the back of it."

His lean fingers came up to catch it at his chest. Scully took advantage of his momentary distraction to claim the whole of the armrest, sticking her elbow out so her arm was slung diagonal across the rest. Mulder was engrossed with the back of the book; he didn't notice.

"Oh," said Mulder, "he's a _debonair_ playboy. That what you like, Scully? The debonair playboy type?"

She rested her cheek on her palm, fingernails at her temple. "I've always preferred the kind of guy who lets me read in peace."

"'When the handsome troublemaker smiles,'" read Mulder in a growling whisper, his sleepy eyes fiercely sleepier, "'her fears dissolve.' I ever make your fears dissolve, Scully?"

"I don't know," she said thoughtfully. "As I recall it, you usually make them worse. But I've only known you for two months."

"I don't want to mop up a Scully puddle anyway," he said. He handed her the book and leaned back in his seat, long, long legs unfolding as much as they could before him. "Wake me up if they do it." He cracked his eyes open. "They _are_ going to do it, right?"

"It's likely. Sex is a common plot element in the genre," she said absently, hunting for her page.

"Ooooh, Agent Scully," murmured Mulder, "you better call a doctor because my heart's running wild."

"Then you'd probably better catch it."

"Who needs a heart, anyway?" asked Mulder, but it was rhetorical, he'd ceded the armrest, and all Scully really wanted was to read her book. She ignored him. 

Eventually, Mulder's head slipped over onto her shoulder; he'd fallen asleep sitting upright. Too many late nights watching horror movies. Scully sighed and gently rolled her shoulder so he moved away, mostly of his own accord. He leaned his head against the side of the plane, over the window. Light refracting off the clouds below washed over his bony face. His mouth was soft, but his face was hard. In sleep, he looked older than thirty-three.

Scully flagged a flight attendant down and asked her, "Can my partner get a blanket?"

"We'll be landing in forty minutes," said the flight attendant.

"Could you still bring him one?"

The flight attendant smiled and said yes. The blanket was small, even shaken out, and when Scully laid it over Mulder, he hunched his shoulders and scrunched his face and curled around it so she had to untuck it and tuck it around his shoulders again. He looked like a sad clown with an over-sized napkin stuck in his collar. Then Mulder shifted again, legs roiling, and the blanket slipped down his chest.

Scully gave up. They were landing in a half hour; he'd live. She read for the rest of the flight, and Mulder only woke when the plane first hit asphalt.

"We here?" he asked, blinking.

"Yes," said Scully. She closed her book and tucked it back into her bag. She'd only managed to read a hundred and some pages. There'd be time later, she supposed, after the case. When she stood to get Mulder's suitcase out of the overhead bin, his fingertips brushed the small of her back.

"I can get it," he told her. He left the blanket pooled on the seat.

"I've got it," Scully said. She handed it to him and then brushed her hair back from her eyes, too busy with shouldering her own satchel and getting into the already crowded aisle to pay him more mind.

"Thanks," said Mulder.

They got off the plane.


	2. Fifty miles outside a small town in California.

Two hours out from the airport, Mulder pulled into the lone pump at a small gas station set at a dry and lonely intersection far off the highway. Scully hit the belt release; the belt whispered as it recoiled, Scully shrugging it from her shoulder.

Mulder squinted at the prices posted on a drooping board some feet before them. At one point the sign had been pointed towards the road; now, winds having done their work, it pointed to the ground. Scully bent to dig her purse out from the recess beneath the dashboard.

"A dollar sixty a gallon," said Mulder. "Can you believe that?" He thumped the steering wheel.

"Gas prices always jump in the summer," she said. 

"It's highway robbery," said Mulder. 

He was playing again. Indignation somewhere in there, real consternation at the price of gasoline, but he'd a tendency to overplay some things in his dry and lazy way. Scully smiled and popped her door. 

"Do you want anything?"

"An oil well in my name," he said. He leaned across the partition. "Get me some more sunflower seeds, would you?" He shouted that through her closing door.

Scully waved her hand at him - I heard you - and jogged through the dust to the gas station's door. A bell tinkled as she pulled it open; behind her, Mulder popped the driver's side door and began to unfold out of the too small, fuel efficient model. 

At the rental place he'd said, "Is this a Scully car? How are normal people supposed to fit in this?" 

Scully had rolled her eyes at him and said, "The average height for the American male is five foot nine." 

"Don't be jealous of my athletic physique," Mulder had said as he pushed the driver's seat back to make room for his knees. The seatbelt had pulled tight across his shoulders, and Scully had looked out her window at the airport spread out behind them.

In the gas station, a single clerk manned the small check-out desk. She'd tired eyes, pink-streaked hair, and her feet propped up on the desk, a magazine spread across her thighs, but she looked up and smiled at Scully and said, "Hi."

"Hi," Scully said, smiling back at her. "Where can I find the maps?"

"Over there with the magazines," said the girl. She pointed at a display case set along the far wall, no windows set over it and only three pairs of long fluorescent lights to illuminate the whole of the station. It was even tinier than it had looked outside. 

Scully nodded her thanks to the girl and moved on. She grabbed a map of California, though Mulder would protest he didn't need it and didn't Scully have any faith in his vast, encyclopedic knowledge of the back roads of America, and then a People magazine. Sunflower seeds, a bottle of water, all the insignificant paraphernalia accumulated on long road trips. 

On the way back to the register, Scully paused and looked out that one bank of windows at the car. Mulder had his back to the windows. One hand on the gas pump, the nozzle fitted to the car, the other arm folded over the top of the car. He was looking out over the road before them, his dark hair ruffled, his tie fluttering against his wide chest as a breeze pushed sidelong against him. He'd left his jacket in the car.

"Will that be all?"

"Yes," said Scully to the girl. 

Then, succumbing to the very temptation she knew it was intended to be, she added a small tin of mints to the order. It was Mulder's habit of sucking at seeds, cracking them between his teeth and feeling with his fingertips for the shells when his tongue did not suffice. It made her own fingers itch, her teeth feel small and square, her tongue devoid of purpose. His thumb would brush over his swollen lower lip. The tip of his tongue would flash between his teeth, and then he would flick the shell out the open window. Never once would he look at her. Eyes lidded against the sun. Other thumb tapping against the steering wheel, out of rhythm with the radio.

"Here's your change," said the attendant, and Scully smiled and accepted first her change then the bag.

She met Mulder in the doorway. They turned their bodies easily, that natural instinct to make room for another without touching, to get through the same finite space without incurring any actual contact. His shoulders bent. So, too, did his neck curve.

"Catch," said Mulder. His fingers flashed; he tossed her the keys.

"Do you really think there's anyone around here who'd want to steal the car?" she asked.

"Trust no one," said Mulder enigmatically as the door began to close on him. He'd rolled his sleeves up so his forearms showed. To the girl behind the desk he would look less like an obsessive hunter of a specific flawed understanding of the truth, a UFO chaser and probable neurotic, than a rumpled office worker lost en route to a remote vacation spot. What did that make Scully, then, in her red slacks and blue blazer, gold cross out on her white scoop-necked shirt, to the consideration of the gas station attendant with the pink hair? Scully pushed it away.

"I got your sunflower seeds," Scully shouted at him. Mulder threw his hand up to her in thanks.

She flicked the keys around her fingers and jogged the distance to the car in her pumps. Her sneakers were in her suitcase in the trunk of the car. She thought about taking the time to swap shoes, then she pushed that away, too. Sneakers could be her reward for getting through the day without once strangling Mulder with his own tie. She'd think longingly of popping them on and going for a walk every time he cracked a shell between his teeth and went fishing for the pieces with his long, narrow fingers.

Mulder ducked back into the car a minute later. Scully had the map unfolded across her lap.

"Hit me," said Mulder.

Scully did not rise to the occasion. "They're in the bag," she said, folding the loose ends of the map under. Mulder twisted, chest aimed at her, and rummaged through the bag where she'd left it on the partition. He'd left his tie on but undone the top button of his shirt. Slovenly. That bit of skin, exposed, made her want to hunch her shoulders and crawl into the back seat. Push him back against the door and remind him of the dress code. 

Sneakers.

"Whoa-ho-ho, Scully," said Mulder. "Salted _and_ barbecue flavor? Is there something you need to tell me? Has guilt for your unending, critical refutations of my work at last overcome your prickly pride?"

"I'm impressed by your improvisational alliteration," said Scully.

"I couldn't think of another pr-word," he said, "but thank you for your support. It means a lot to me."

They rolled out of the station and hooked a left at the intersection, down another long stretch of dusty, empty road.

"Twenty miles down this way," Scully said, tracing the roads on the map with her fingernails, "then we'll take a right and pass through another town."

"So what's your theory?" 

He popped the bag of sunflower open. Salted, by the smell. She'd grown overly familiar with the subtle scents associated with the variety of flavored sunflower seeds he consumed on a regular basis. It was alarming to think she could now determine whether he'd a seed dusted with chili powder or a seed slow-roasted in honey between his teeth simply by the faint traces of powder lingering on his knuckles from where they had rubbed against the inside of the bag.

Scully looked out the front window at the unpaved dirt road. The car jostled around them, rocks and possibly gopher holes - were gophers native to California? - jerking the steering wheel minutely in Mulder's steady hands.

"Tremors could account for the vibration of objects," she said, "how furniture relocates of its own power from one end of a room to another seemingly in moments."

"These people live nowhere near a fault line," Mulder countered.

"Aftershocks can travel hundreds of miles in a matter of seconds," said Scully. "Depending on the severity of any given earthquake, people who would normally never experience tremors in their lives might find their house shaking around them."

He conceded the point with a shell cracked between his teeth. She had become adept at deciphering the particular physical language unique to Mulder. Perhaps she could publish a paper on it.

"As for the drastic changes in personality, the boy's physical presentation, and his voice, there are a number of psychiatric disorders which could account for any or all of the claimed symptoms of possession. Dissociative identity disorder, Gilles de la Tourette's Syndrome, schizophrenia-- Abuse or a proscriptive religious environment could also explain why this child is acting out in the way that he is." 

She glanced at Mulder, who far from annoyed or smug appeared to be enjoying her lecture. He was smiling and holding another seed at his lips; he'd looked away from the road briefly to consider Scully in the seat beside him. The corners of his eyes crinkled.

"Demonic possession is a superstitious relic of a time when the general population was kept ignorant by a power base that misplaced science and understanding for fear," she told him.

He reached across the car, flicked her dangling cross with a single lean finger. The brush of his palm over her shoulder made her chest tighten. He withdrew, eyes on the road again.

"And what's the Catholic Church's official take on possession?"

"Faith," said Scully sharply, "doesn't mean you have to agree uncritically with anything, however preposterous or unreasonable, anyone claims to be true."

"That's heretical, Agent Scully," said Mulder. He launched a shell out the window. "In Europe circa the fourteen century, they believed women with red hair were witches."

She threw him a dry look that got her another quick glance and another grin.

"Another superstitious belief," she told him, "encouraged by a lack of institutional support for scientific reasoning."

"Oh, Scully," Mulder sighed, "I love it when you talk social sciences to me."

"Eyes on the road, Mulder," said Scully.


End file.
